Hailing
from Dartford, The Alibi take inspiration from their bleak surroundings and
write about what they describe as a black and white town under a sky of
colours. A place that influences the industrial soundprint of their core sound,
they write about what they see. Political observations, justice, the current
social unrest - they create songs that matter about life as they see it and
play them with passion and force.
We
got the chance to speak to Harry Love from the band about their brand new
single ‘No Solution’, their hopes for the year and their recent live successes!
You recently performed at
the Camden Rocks Festival; how was that?
Camden
Rocks was enjoyable! It was something we haven’t really done before so it was
great getting to know the other bands that are going about, and it’s cool to
see that there is a rock and roll movement. It’s cool to see that their other
bands aspiring to the same stuff that we’re doing!
How would you describe your
live sound?
It’s
a hard nail to hit on the head as every show is different, but we’re a rock and
roll band and we’ve got a message to put across to people, so we spread our
message through our lyrics, through our instruments that we play, and the way
we are on a stage. It’s a night to remember!
You’ve also done acoustic
sets on Facebook; was it interesting to take your music in that direction?
Yes!
That was fun. We had a gig on the Saturday night. We’d hardly got any sleep and
when we woke up on the Sunday our drummer was like ‘let’s do an acoustic set in
an hour!’. We were like ‘go on then’ so we had an hour to quickly get our set
done acoustically, but it was cool to hear it all stripped back again. The way
we like to write is to write acoustically. We haven’t heard the songs that way
in quite a long time so it was interesting!
Your new song is called ‘No
Solution’. How would you describe it?
‘No
Solution’ is a cry for help for the younger generation. It’s plain to see now
through the general election we’ve just had, and it’ll be interesting to see
how many young people carry on caring about the state of our country and the
world. It’s a cry for the younger generation to get their voice and their
points across. We write about real things; we don’t write about made-up
stories. We write as we see it and we hope that the rest of our generation see
it the way we do.
The
crazy thing is that we wrote the song maybe a year-and-a-half ago. It shows
that there is no solution!
The video for the single has
some very startling imagery mixed in with political images; was that important
for you as a concept?
Yes.
The whole storyboarding did take a couple of months to get it the way we wanted
it and our message across. It’s one thing having the message through the music
but the visuals, especially in this day and age, are a big part of it. A big
hand to everyone who was part of that video; they hit the nail on the head!
Do you feel strongly about
having something to say in your music, politically or otherwise?
It’s
funny you should ask that as there have been days when we don’t want to be too
politically engaged, but it always ends up being about the way we see the state
of the world. I’d like to say we are politically charged, as it’s a shame today
that musicians don’t take note of what’s actually going on in politics. Music
from day one has always been a rebellious art and movement. It’s interesting to
see that there’s not a lot of artists doing that any more.
Was the recording process of
the single a good one?
Yeah,
we love going into the studio! It’s just as good as playing live shows.
What are your plans going
forward from here?
I
think we’re going to release the second single in a couple of months’ time. We’ve
got the album ready to go so as soon as things start picking up the albums
going to be out there. We’ve got shows coming up everywhere. We’re playing a
festival soon. This Thursday, local to us in Dartford, we’ve got the final
heats for the Battle of the Bands at this year’s Dartford Festival, so it’ll be
interesting to see how that goes!
How are preparations going
for that?
Good!
We’re always playing in London so it’s nice to come back and play some local
gigs in front of a local crowd, and it’s always funny that you get the one
person who may have seen us locally, say, two years ago but has seen our
progress online and they may come and see us and be like ‘No way, you’re the
same band!’
Finally what are your big
ambitions for the rest of the year?
By
the end of the year it would be cool to have this as our full time line of
work. We all work independently elsewhere, probably on careers we don’t want to
do. We put every spare minute into this, with blood, sweat and tears. Some
people don’t seem to appreciate that sometimes, so it would be good to get onto
some big festivals, get a record out there and make a name for ourselves. The
biggest ambition of the band has always been to play Wembley – that’s the one!
Got to dream big!
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